Employee stole £2k from
cash office in Sainsbury’s

Staff Reporter

A forty-year-old Bishop Street woman who stole £2,000 from Sainsbury’s in September was handed a six month suspended jail term at Derry Magistrate’s Court on Friday.

Grainne McGinley, of Mountjoy Street, was also convicted of stealing a further £1,300 from a charity collection box in the Strand Road store on the same day.

Among McGinley’s tasks at the supermarket was the replenishment of the self-service tills, a Public Prosecution Service (PPS) solicitor told the court.

Store CCTV footage showed that she had been behaving “very differently than normal” on the day £2,000 went missing from the cash office and a further £1,600 went missing from the charity collection, the court heard. On September 29, was captured by CCTV behaving in a “manic” manner, which was considered unusual and a departure from her normally “very methodical” behaviour.

The defendant was later questioned by police and admitted that she had amassed “huge amounts of debt” in the lead up to the offending.

A defence solicitor said McGinley had worked for Sainsbury’s for nine years and had become a trusted employee. He said the offending had “destroyed her previously unblemished reputation”. District Judge Barney McElholm accepted the offending had been impulsive, ordered McGinley pay compensation of £3,300, and handed her a six month sentence, suspended for two years.